Cavell and the Politics of Cinema: on Marie Antoinette Richard Rushton1

Film-Philosophy 18 (2014): Special Section on Stanley Cavell Cavell and the Politics of Cinema: On Marie Antoinette Richard Rushton1 In his writings, does Stanley Cavell propose something which might be called a ‘politics of cinema’? If the answer to such a question is ‘yes’, then I take it that a politics of cinema from Cavell’s perspective is one which downplays the question of cinematic techniques. For Cavell, a film’s ‘reflexivity’ or its foregrounding of the apparatus are not the grounds for defining a politics of cinema. Rather, Cavell asks questions like: How does a film articulate the stakes of a social or communal world? or: How does a film come to define the ways in which a group of people can live together? A political analysis of a film for Cavell would examine any film’s ways of articulating and defining a political society or framework. That is, a politics of cinema from Cavell’s perspective is one in which the stakes are to define a society or community. What is a ‘community’ or ‘society’? In a straightforward sense, a society is any group of people that is organised in such a way that its organisation persists over time, or that it might persist over time. A community or society therefore must be relatively stable, otherwise it could not be called a community or society. And yet, at the same time, any community will also be the product of its own continually changing processes of making and remaking itself. A political community therefore will only ever be relatively stable, so that change, disruption and transformation will be integral to any social formation. These are processes central for conceptions of democracy, for democracy offers the only political model that makes change and transformation integral to its very form. Cornelius Castoriadis once described the practice of democracy as ‘a collective activity whose object is the institution of society as such’ (Castoriadis 1991, 102). He argued very convincingly that it is in ancient Greece generally and with the invention of democracy specifically that the question of what is right and what is wrong first emerged (Castoriadis 1991, 101), which is to say that questions like, ‘What is a just society?’ or ‘How do we create a society that is just?’ are ones that first emerged in tandem with the invention of democracy. At stake for democracy is the continued reflection on and asking of questions such as these. A democratic politics is one that pursues a stable society while at the same time always leaving that society open to change. Alongside stability, therefore, is a sense of continual negotiation and change over time. These democratic models are difficult ones to work with. To theorise something 1 University of Lancaster: [email protected] www.film-philosophy.com 110 Film-Philosophy 18 (2014): Special Section on Stanley Cavell that is at once both relatively stable but also subject to sometimes radical disruption and change is not an easy thing to do. Democracy means this: every aspect of society is negotiable and subject to change, while at the same time society can still be organised in various ways. What senses of Cavell’s politics might be able to emerge from all of this? Perhaps a place to set out from is to declare that societies have found throughout history a range of various ways of functioning, but that what democracy demands is a constant questioning, negotiation and redefinition of those ways and processes by means of which a society functions. These might at first appear to be very vague parameters to draw around a theory of politics or a philosophy of democracy, but in Stanley Cavell’s approaches to cinema (and elsewhere) something like a theory of democracy can be said to be present. Pursuits of Happiness (1981) and Contesting Tears (1994) can even be seen as much works of a ‘politics of cinema’ as they are works laying out genres or cycles of films. On explicit matters of politics, Cavell contends that most modern theories of political constitution – John Locke and John Rawls are explicitly invoked – involve various ways of trying to consider how the members of a society consent to ‘being’ a society. What agreements, procedures, legal and moral frameworks are necessary in order for any member of a society to declare that he or she ‘consents’ to being a member of that society? On the back of such questions, Cavell tries to envisage what is called ‘taking one’s place’ in a society. What can such a thing mean, to ‘take one’s place’ in a society? Might it be the case that, Cavell asks, when I find myself placed in a society I might also be somewhat dismayed by that society, to discover that, in fact, even though I may find myself in this society, I don’t necessarily consent to such a thing. Cavell conjectures that taking one’s place might not be such an easy thing to do: And let’s suppose that you do not see the place, or do not like the places you see. You may of course take on the experience of accepting the choices, and this may present itself to you as your having adopted a state of fraudulence, a perpetual sense of some false position you have assumed, without anyone’s exactly having placed you there. A mark of this stage is a sense of obscurity, to yourself as well as to others, one expression of which is a sense of compromise, of being asked to settle too soon for the world as it is, a perplexity in relating yourself to what you find unacceptable in your world, without knowing what you can be held responsible for. Do I, for example, consent to the degree of injustice we all live with? Do I know how to define my position with respect to it? (Cavell 2004, 23). How do I define my position? How do I consent to the world in which I am www.film-philosophy.com 111 Film-Philosophy 18 (2014): Special Section on Stanley Cavell placed? These are founding questions for Cavell’s approach to politics. I can find myself in a ‘place’ in a society which bamboozles me, which contains a sense of no longer knowing how this society got to be the way it is and therefore of how I got to be here, and thus, to an extent I can feel as though I know longer know who I am, to wonder whether I can confidently declare that, in a Cartesian manner, ‘I am, I exist’. On Cinema These considerations allow Cavell to formulate a ‘two worlds’ thesis which he teases out of the writings of Emerson. In his understanding of Emerson, Cavell invokes the Kantian split between the sensible and the intelligible, to the extent that he conceives of this split as being a way of defining different kinds of worlds – one a sensible world, the other an intelligible one. From one perspective Kant named these two worlds the phenomenal and the noumenal, but these worlds are also related to the further distinction between a world that is determined by the conditions of the Understanding on the one hand, and that which is rather more open to the freedom of Reason on the other. While these Kantian distinctions serve as a conceptual background, it is nevertheless with Emerson, on Cavell’s reading, that the distinction between ‘worlds’ takes an innovative turn, even as Cavell sees such inspirations going back at least as far as Plato. For Cavell’s Emerson, the division between the sensible and the intelligible becomes a division between the way the world is now and some future vision or fantasy of what we would like the world to become. Such distinctions can certainly be discerned in Kant – that the world of phenomena is the world of our experience which sets limits upon our knowledge, while the world of noumena hearkens us towards a beyond in which we might truly know ‘things-in-themselves’. For Plato, that other world is the world of Ideas, a world of essential forms beyond those degraded sensible forms with which we come into contact in our everyday lives in this world. In Emerson, Cavell finds this notion of two worlds – of the world as it is and of the world as it might become – to be a central inspiration. The two worlds thesis most explicitly finds its stake if we find ourselves confronted with in an especially problematic condition of the way the world is now. This is another way of saying that I do not like my place in the society in which I find myself; that I am ‘out of place’. Readers familiar with Cavell will surely have noted the cinematic gestures already in play here. We could begin by demonstrating the ways in which The World Viewed (1979) is framed around a distinction between two worlds: a first which we inhabit in the here and now and another world which is screened for us by the film being projected before our eyes and ears. And those familiar with Cavell will know that he takes this distinction in the direction of subjectivity in so far as my subjectivity in the here and www.film-philosophy.com 112 Film-Philosophy 18 (2014): Special Section on Stanley Cavell now is definitively separated from that other world which is screened by movies. And one of the main tasks of The World Viewed is to discover the ways in which a connection might be forged between the isolation of my subjectivity and that other world which the movies project for me, with the conclusion that, if the modern condition is one of being ‘trapped’ behind my subjectivity, then perhaps the movies can show us how to get out of that entrapment, to discover a world beyond the confines of subjectivity, to discover the world as such.

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